Using Drupal to Build Fact Fluency
Developing an educational tool for Stenhouse Publishers
Stenhouse Publishers
About Stenhouse Publishers
Stenhouse Publishers, a subsidiary of Highlights for Children, provides quality professional learning resources by teachers, for teachers. Their curated classroom resources aim to equip educators with the tools they need to expand instruction and provide a well-rounded education to their students.
The Opportunity
With a mission to make math meaningful and fun for all students, teachers Graham Fletcher and Tracy Johnston Zager created Building Fact Fluency: A Toolkit for Addition & Subtraction. Full of highly visual, ready-to-use resources, the toolkit focuses on helping teachers integrate common routines and strategies into their math instruction, allowing students to develop a deeper understanding of numbers.
Stenhouse Publishers sought a robust online educational toolkit that could help bring the activities and tasks of Building Fact Fluency to life and provide engaging supplementary resources for teachers to incorporate into each lesson.
The Solution
Always eager to positively affect education through technology, BT developed an innovative and interactive online companion toolkit to arm teachers with additional resources to boost student engagement and understanding. Using open-source Drupal as the content management system, BT created a digital version of Building Fact Fluency that includes a variety of engaging videos, downloadable and printable resources for class use, and projectable versions of problems and flipcharts. Teachers can also access professional learning videos to see game demonstrations, classroom lessons, and assessment strategies.
BT’s innovative approach to enhancing the components of Building Fact Fluency through an online educational toolkit allows Stenhouse Publishers to offer comprehensive resources that help expand and diversify classroom instruction. Along with developing a toolkit focused on addition and subtraction, BT has also created an online educational resource for Building Fact Fluency: A Toolkit for Multiplication & Division. The flexibility and customization capabilities of Drupal allow BT to create two different themes on a single database and server, helping to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of managing content across multiple sites.
“The folks at Breakthrough Technology felt like members of our own team at every step of the way. They spent the time to truly understand our product, our customers, and our goals and used that knowledge to help us bring our vision to life in an elegant and intuitive way, with user experience at the center. They provided insight, guidance, creativity, and alternate ways to consider accomplishing our objectives. Plus they were on-time, on-budget, highly communicative, responsive, and transparent. We are so pleased with the final product and loved working with them so much that we are a little sad to see our project nearing completion!”
Emily Hawkins, General Manager, Stenhouse Publishers